Beacon Sound is a lovely record store, but on Sunday evening, it was transformed into a cramped, sweaty box during Jessica Hopper's packed reading from The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic. And you know what? I was fine with it. It's wonderful to see this many beardos and baby feminists coming together out of excitement for this particular book. (For more on the book itself—it is excellent—look no further than Robert Ham's fascinating conversation with Hopper here.)
Hopper has a deadpan demeanor, and she's a no-nonsense journalist, which made her reading a lot more fun and a lot less precious than many I've been to. She talked at length about writing bad reviews ("They're easier"*), getting to interview Bjork after listening to her new album ("Poor Bjork, I hate Matthew Barney!"), contemporary mastering ("I can't listen to [it] for more than an hour"), and getting temporarily banned from reviewing for Spin after she gave the Rolling Stones' Bridges to Babylon "a 2."
When the topic of abuse allegations against R. Kelly came up during the post-reading Q&A, Hopper seemed not particularly enthused about discussing him. In her book, she includes an interview with Jim DeRogatis, who was the reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times who broke the story about R. Kelly's predatory behavior towards adolescent girls. It's a disturbing, necessary conversation about reporting and sexual assault that hopefully gets even more attention now that this collection is out. In her intro to the piece, Hopper writes that the R. Kelly story is one that DeRogatis "wishes didn't exist." I got the sense Hopper felt the same way, though she was forthright about her earlier skepticism about the allegations against R. Kelly—skepticism that resulted in DeRogatis sending her information about the lawsuits against Kelly, and, by extension, their interview.
"I was speaking out of ignorance," she said, adding that there was real risk for DeRogatis in reporting on Kelly when no one else would. "The day after he wrote the story he did have the windows of his house shot out."
When somebody asked the question it seems people are always asking critics—some iteration of "Does enjoying the R. Kelly, Woody Allen, Chris Brown, et al. make me complicit in alleged abuse?"—she said she didn't have an answer, but that "I don't get down with Chris Brown," that she'll never go to another R. Kelly show, and that she tries to avoid reviewing musicians whose creepy reputations precede them.
This shouldn't be at all surprising if you've read Hopper's writing. Her feminism is integral to her criticism. That's one of the qualities that sets it apart from plenty of the stuff you could read by other music writers. It's the basis of her stance on Chris Brown and R. Kelly, and also her nuanced approach to both female pop stars—Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus—and female-fronted bands like the Raincoats and Bikini Kill. I was reminded of that this morning, when I interviewed the singer in a band of all women who told me that outside liberal hubs like Seattle and Portland, her group is often tagged as a "girl band," a dismissive write-off if ever there was one. It's depressing that the title of Hopper's book is accurate—that her book is actually the first collection of criticism by a living female rock critic—but when "girl band" is still a pejorative, it's good to know that critics like Hopper are out there, lending a necessarily caustic, feminist lens to music.
*I can corroborate this.
